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A ‘European Memory of the Jewish Extermination’? Spain as a Methodological Challenge

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 September 2012

Salvador Orti Camallonga
Salvador Orti Camallonga
Affiliation:
Downing College, University of Cambridge, UK. Email: so313@cam.ac.uk
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Abstract

This article seeks to question academic assertions of a European memory of the Jewish extermination by using the Spanish case. Peculiar links between Spain and the Jewish genocide indicate that a common European story about the Jewish extermination cannot be taken for granted. On the contrary, I propose an alternative model focused on the transmission process and the actors that control it, namely national narratives, anti-Semitic rhetoric and, over the past few decades, ‘Holocaust mass media products’. Such an approach will not only provide useful insights about the perception of the Jewish extermination in countries outside the traditional academic spectrum on Holocaust studies, but will also portray Spain's self-image in a European perspective.

Type
Focus: European Civil Wars
Information
European Review , Volume 20 , Issue 4 , 04 September 2012 , pp. 475 - 491
Copyright
Copyright © Academia Europaea 2012

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References

References and Notes

1. This investigation will avoid the term ‘Holocaust’ and, instead, will employ ‘the Jewish extermination’, ‘the Jewish annihilation’ or similar terms. However, it seems necessary to explain this rationale in more detail, and for this purpose the study of Zev Garber and Bruce Zuckerman about the word ‘Holocaust’ is highly relevant. They indicate that ‘Holocaust’ comes from the Latin holocaustum, which originally derives from the Greek holokaustos, which means ‘something wholly burnt up’. According to Garber and Zuckerman, before the Second World War, ‘holocaust’ denoted a ‘religious sacrifice’, and after the conflict the elimination of the Jews was referred to as the ‘Nazi Final Solution on the Jewish Question’. Garber and Zuckerman have highlighted that it was the Romanian survivor Elie Wiesel who made this word popular during the 1950s, and the term would become frequently used during the Eichmann trial in 1961 and in the following two decades. Wiesel, as Garber and Zuckerman state, adopted the term with ‘unmistakable religious/sacrificial overtones’ and especially with the notion that the Jews were, like Abraham's son in Genesis 22, the ‘chosen victims’, the ‘only ones’, Israel. Similarly, as Garber and Zuckerman point out, the word ‘Shoah’ comes from biblical Hebrew and means ‘destruction, ruin’. Garber, Z. and Zuckerman, B. (1989) Why do we call the Holocaust ‘The Holocaust’? An inquiry into the psychology of labels. Modern Judaism, 9(2), 198–200. and 202–205. Due to these religious connotations, it seems inconvenient to use the terms ‘Holocaust’ and ‘Shoah’. The term ‘Jewish extermination’, on the contrary, avoids a narrow understanding of the destruction of the Jewish population as ‘only’ their physical elimination in Death Camps; the broader meaning that is implied by the term ‘Jewish extermination’ will allow this investigation to take into account more aspects surrounding the event when analysing its perception in Spain. I will, however, use ‘Holocaust representations’ or ‘Holocaust mass media’, for these terms do not define the nature of the annihilation of the European Jews.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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